


Opposites Attract

by dreamycastaway



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Gardener!Aziraphale - Freeform, M/M, Nanny!Crowley - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-11
Updated: 2019-07-11
Packaged: 2020-06-26 06:07:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,775
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19762165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dreamycastaway/pseuds/dreamycastaway
Summary: “They were almost exact opposites of each other,” Warlock began, and, knowing that his friends would probably take this to mean that his Nanny was thin and all angles, while his gardener was soft and round, or that she was stern and he was gentle, immediately clarified his statement: “and not just in the way you’re thinking of. I mean, she literally told me I would ‘rule when Earth’s destroyed’ and he told me I ‘must never destroy the Earth.’” He shook his head. “Why would you say either of those things to a child?”





	Opposites Attract

**Author's Note:**

> Part of a trade with [nim-lock](https://nim-lock.tumblr.com/) on tumblr! Go look at all of their amazing artwork! 
> 
> Rated T because of alcohol references, I just wanted to be safe.

It was eleven years and change since the apocalypse was narrowly averted by four eleven year olds, with a bit of help from two lovers who wouldn’t admit it, two people who were remarkably bad at their jobs, and two people who found themselves in the midst of something they rather would not have been dragged into. For the most part, everyone had gotten on with their lives, either being in the know concerning what had not happened and breathing a sigh of relief that it had not, or not being in the know about anything, and being remarkably unaffected by how close they had come to Rapture. Only one person could not be sorted neatly into one of these two categories: Warlock Dowling. 

Warlock Dowling, now a young man, had done relatively well for himself in the second half of his life. He had done relatively well in the first half of his life, too, but he had not done it for himself. Warlock would later recall that on his eleventh birthday, it was as if a switch had flipped inside him and he decided he wanted to stop being such a menace. On both counts, Warlock Dowling was wrong. What Warlock had realized was that the world ought to be cherished and that he ought to embrace being human, and he had realized this some days after his eleventh birthday. But the human mind is fickle and overly dependent upon heuristics, and the mind of a child all the more so. 

It was now eleven years and one day since Warlock Dowling had somehow come to the realization that, in no uncertain terms, he didn’t want to be a brat anymore. This decision had served him well thus far with everyone but his parents and their ilk, whose misplaced disappointment in this son began with his decision at eleven and change to not be a brat anymore, and was then compounded by his decision at sixteen to tell them he was bisexual, his decision at eighteen to go to Oxford instead of West Point, and his decision at twenty to become a vegetarian and announce that he considered himself a pacifist. His parents’ disappointment upset him, but he had accepted it with as much grace as a twenty-two-year-old was able.

It was all of these monumental decisions plus several hundred smaller ones that had brought Warlock Dowling to where he was now: crammed in with six friends at a small table in the King’s Arms pub, celebrating his belated birthday over pints and pies. They had been there for a while now, as made obvious by the empty glasses, the red faces, and the wide smiles that would make their mouths sore in the morning. As is typical on the eve of a graduation, they had spent the last several hours reminiscing. Having run out of stories about their college years, but still trapped in the sticky embrace of nostalgia, the young adults had turned to childhood stories. 

“ _Oh_ , Warlock, tell them about that nanny of yours.” Warlock looked across the table to see his best friend of four years sipping the last bit of her drink, incredulity already starting to take hold on her face as she remembered all the ridiculous stories Warlock had told her their first year. 

“Yeah, alright,” he smiled. “But I’ve got to tell them all about Brother Francis too. He’s half of why it was all so _weird_.” 

“ _How_ could I forget about Francis! Was he even a monk?” She flashed Warlock the type of grin exchanged between old friends who are proud to know each other well. 

“Honestly, I … don’t think so. And I think “Nanny” might actually have been, like, a drag persona or something.”

Even with the storytelling chops of a young man who had read everything he could get his hands on even _before_ he decided to study English Literature at Oxford, and had written quite a bit besides, it was still difficult to get the story started. How do you manage to capture a childhood defined by the constant presence of two of the strangest people you’d ever met, while keeping it short enough to tell your friends over drinks? 

“They were almost exact opposites of each other,” he began, and, knowing that his friends would probably take this to mean that his Nanny was thin and all angles, while his gardener was soft and round, or that she was stern and he was gentle, immediately clarified his statement: “and _not_ just in the way you’re thinking of. I mean, she literally told me I would ‘rule when Earth’s destroyed’ and he told me I ‘must never destroy the Earth.’” He shook his head. “Why would you say _either_ of those things to a child?”

“Jeez. They must have hated each other even worse than your parents.” 

Warlock grimaced a little at the jab, but quickly decided he wasn’t going to let his parents get in the way of enjoying his birthday party. “You’d think, right? But I actually think they were … in love?” 

His friends snorted and giggled. 

“No, really! Like, okay, I had this plant when I was six, right? And …”

As the storytelling got underway, the young Mr. Dowling felt as if he were back in his six-year-old body, toddling through the gardens in his soon-to-be-unpolished little loafers, his ridiculous-for-a-six-year-old American flag lapel pin reflecting sunlight in a rather obnoxious way. He was holding something close to his chest, in a way that clearly was more for his own comfort than the object’s safety.

“Brother Francis!” he yelled, a few tears starting to stream down his face. “Brother Francis!” He called out again as he approached the kind old man, rather more sobbing than yelling at this point. 

“Young Master Warlock!” Brother Francis turned around, gray eyes twinkling as they always did. “Why, what’s wrong?” 

“It’s Anthony,” Warlock cried. “I think … I think he’s dead.” 

A moment of panic passed over Brother Francis’ face, for reasons incredibly obvious to anyone knowing who Brother Francis really was. Luckily, it went unnoticed by the inconsolable child, who was far more concerned with wiping the tears off his face and shoving the object he had been clutching towards the gardener than he was with parsing the micro-expressions of the much older man. 

The object, as it turned out, was a half-dead Venus Fly Trap in an all-black terracotta pot. 

“Oh, Anthony!” Brother Francis said, recalling the plant he had given to Warlock earlier this week. “Yes, Anthony, of course.” He looked at the plant, pretending to know anything about plants, praying that what he said next would be true. “Anthony’s going to be just fine, Master Warlock.” 

“Really?” Warlock said through blubbering tears. 

“Yes. Why don’t I look after him tonight, hmm?” 

“Okay…” 

“Go ahead and tell him you’ll be back for him tomorrow afternoon, hmm?” The gardener paused, and patted Warlock reassuringly on the back. “And then go enjoy this beautiful Saturday and I’ll watch over him until tonight, when I can take him to the plant doctor.”

Warlock nodded resolutely, imagining that this is how “the troops” his father talked about so often must feel when they cross the threshold into field hospitals, bearing their wounded comrades. He leaned down to whisper some reassuring words to Anthony, hugged the gardener, and ran off into the Saturday afternoon. 

**

Unbeknownst to anyone besides the two of them, Nanny and Brother Francis met every other Saturday night, under the pretense of discussing how they felt their plan was coming along. Frequently, there were other, unspoken agenda items, of varying degrees of excitement. Tonight, the first thing on the docket was Anthony. 

Nanny was circling Brother Francis in a way that would have rather reminded the in-the-know onlooker of the demon Crowley. “You … gave him a plant named Anthony?” Nanny asked, trying desperately to keep any tone out of her tone of voice. She mostly succeeded at seeming neutral, helped immeasurably by her dark glasses. 

A smirk that looked as if it would be more at home on the face of the angel Aziraphale began to play on Brother Francis’ lips. “Yes. You can imagine how horrified I was when he told me Anthony was dead.”

“But … Anthony is _my_ name.” 

“Yes, well. I told you I’d get used to it. I guess I’ve grown rather too fond of it.” 

Nanny had stopped her serpentine walking, and was now standing across from the gardener with Anthony on the table between them. “Why a Fly Trap?” 

“I read in a parenting column that teaching children to raise plants can help instill a sense of responsibility and care. And I figured, what with him liking dinosaurs and their teeth so much …” Neither being could stifle their chuckle. The Almighty’s little joke about a race of giant lizards ruling the planet got funnier with every passing year, and every passing human that believed it. “Besides, I know how Dagon and Beelzebub hate these things … I thought you might get quite a kick out of it.” This earned him an uproarious laugh from Nanny, who found herself almost doubled over by the thought of Beelzebub’s face if they knew the Anti-Christ was raising a Fly Trap. 

Nanny feigned wiping a tear from below her glasses, and the old man across from her looked at her expectantly. “So?” 

“So … what?” 

The gardener exhaled, irritated at being put in the position of explaining something so obvious. “So, can you heal this plant?” 

“Oh, I don’t know. Warlock told me you were going to ‘take him to the plant doctor,’” Nanny teased. “Besides … healing is rather too ‘good’ a thing for me to do, isn’t it?” 

Brother Francis’ face had not been built to express annoyance, but it was trying its hardest nonetheless. He knew that Nanny had quite a green thumb, and he wasn’t sure why this particular task was seeming to drag on like a live reading of James Joyce’s _Ulysses_. He opened his mouth with the intention of expressing his aggravation, but thought better of it at the last minute, deciding to take the high road. “Please.” 

“Fine.” She looked at the pot, well aware that what she was about to do would not be a hellish influence on the boy’s life. “Never was able to say ‘no’ to you,” she mumbled. The second half of her thought: _though it seems to be much of what you say to me_ lingered on her mind as she leaned down towards the plant. 

Given the other similarities between Nanny and the demon Crowley, one would have expected her to start yelling at the Fly Trap, screaming at it that she knew it could do better. Unfortunately, shouting threats at plants was a rather unsuitable gardening technique for a clandestine meeting in the middle of the night, and Nanny was forced to resort to softly, but sternly, telling Anthony the Fly Trap that she wasn’t angry, she was just disappointed. 

She pushed the Fly Trap back towards the gardener. “I think it’ll shape up now.” She paused. “But it does need more sunlight. You can tell Warlock it’s doctor’s orders.” 

Relief that he had not lied to the child about the plant being alright spread across Brother Francis’ face. He looked down on the already perkier Fly Trap. “Oh, thank you! You know, sometimes I think you should have been the gardener.” 

Nanny and Brother Francis were opposites in a great many ways, but perhaps one of their most difficult differences was that Brother Francis tended to say things without thinking when he was overjoyed, and Nanny tended to say things without thinking when she was angry. Brother Francis had not been thinking when he suggested that Nanny should have been a gardener, and as he watched her purse her already thin lips into an even tighter line, he knew he had made a mistake. He took in a deep breath and blinked slowly, waiting for the sound of Nanny screaming or the greenhouse door slamming behind her. Instead, he heard one small, stifled sob. 

A quiet “oh” escaped his lips, full of sadness, and he quickly stepped around the table to embrace his companion. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” he said over and over again as she stood limp in his arms, crying softly. 

No one else on the face of the Earth could have understood that long before this being had been Nanny or Crowley, he _had_ once been a gardener, in the first and finest Garden there had ever been. It had been his apple tree that had been so powerful that the Almighty had deemed it forbidden. He had been so proud of his tree, the Tree of Everything. It was by praising his horticultural chops that Lucifer had convinced the Gardener to hear him out in the first place. The rest, of course, is history – the beginning of his sauntering vaguely downwards. 

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” the muttering continued, Brother Francis’ voice breaking as he tried to contain his own tears. He knew better than to ask for forgiveness, to use that word his friend hated so much. He was almost certain that this would be, at the very least, the end of their colleagueship in the Dowling home. He was deeply worried that that would certainly foreshadow the end of the world. He would not allow himself to give in to the fear that this may be the end of their friendship. 

As Brother Francis teetered on the edge of panic, he heard his companion take a shuddering breath. He stepped back a few inches, holding his breath as he waited for Nanny’s verdict. 

“It’s okay, Angel.” She said, the first time she had called him that since they had arrived here. “It’s okay,” she repeated, and the two of them let the tension fall away from their shoulders. “I’m just glad no one else was here to see that.” 

What neither Nanny or Brother Francis had realized was that someone else had been there to see it – none other than young Warlock, who had snuck out of bed in hopes of catching a glimpse of the mysterious plant doctor. 

Luckily for the nanny and the gardener, he had not understood most of what he had observed. The boy tiptoed back towards the house, carrying the weight of the exciting new secret that his Nanny was apparently moonlighting as a plant doctor named Anthony. And that his Nanny and his gardener were somehow, despite all their differences, deeply and unchangeably in love. 

**

“So … what happened to them?” The question from across the table pulled Warlock out of his hazy reminiscence and back to the cramped pub table. 

He shrugged. “They just both … disappeared one day.” 

His friends stared back at him in stunned silence. “Did you look for them?” 

“I guess, but I was eleven. The fact they hadn’t told anyone I asked that they were leaving basically put a stop to my detective work.” 

“Did you ever see them again?” 

“I … don’t know. I don’t think so.” 

“Oh, he ‘doesn’t think so’. You hear that lads? Warlock’s life is so damn weird, he’s not sure if he’s run into the weirdest two people I’ve ever heard of, who happened to disappear under mysterious circumstances.” His friends laughed. “Maybe you’ve had enough to drink, Warlock.” Warlock looked down at his several empty beer glasses, and agreed that he probably had had enough to drink. 

As the conversation moved on to other people’s much more typical nannies and babysitters, Warlock remembered the odd second-hand bookstore he had stumbled into a few months ago. It had seemed to him to be owned by a husband and husband team – one of whom was thin and all angles, one of whom was soft and round. They had been helping each other into their coats and chattering about what the lunch special at the Ritz might be this time of year when he walked in. This normally wouldn’t have stood out to him much – secondhand bookstores tended to contain all sorts of people. 

What _had_ stood out to the young man was that while his back was turned to the till as he browsed, he had been almost _certain_ he heard the shorter of the two say softly to the taller “Look, Anthony, Sweetheart, it’s Warlock Dowling. He’s all grown up.” 

Warlock spun around, his mouth forming the question before he even knew what he was asking. “Brother Francis?” But the shop was empty. On the register was a small, handwritten note: “Out to lunch. May return later.”


End file.
